Starting at 2.15 pm, to conclude with tea at 3.45 pm.
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Jean Stone, Trinity, and the emergence of “charismatic renewal”, c. 1959-1966
Various scholarly and popular accounts of the charismatic movement mention the role of American Episcopalian Jean Stone, the California-based Blessed Trinity Society, and Trinity magazine in the early development of the renewal movement. It was Stone who in 1960 persuaded Time and Newsweek to cover the story of the Revd Dennis Bennett and tongues speaking at St Marks’s, Van Nuys. Indeed it was she who with Harald Bredesen appears to have publically coined the term ‘charismatic renewal’. This paper offers an assessment of Stone’s ministry and the magazine she edited. It shows the ways in which Stone and Trinity narrated the spread of Baptism in the Spirit in the historic churches, and articulated the characteristics of the early renewal movement. It demonstrates the role, both nationally and transnationally, of this ministry in the early development and construction of charismatic renewal.
19 May, 4th week, Dr Mark Smith, Associate Prof in History and Fellow of Kellogg College
Through the vicarage window: a view of the impact of the First World War on the Church of England in Oxfordshire
While the impact of the First World War on the religious beliefs and practice of soldiers at the front has been subject to significant study in recent years, the effect of wartime conditions on the Church at home has received rather less attention. This paper uses the replies to a set of episcopal visitation queries for the Oxford diocese in 1918 to investigate the impact of the war on the parishes of Oxfordshire as seen through the eyes of their incumbent clergy. It discusses the capacity of this source to be revealing both about the experience of parishioners and the priorities and preoccupations of the Anglican clergy in the last year of the war.
2 June, 6th week, Dr Matthew Grimley, Mark Reynolds Tutor in History, Merton College
Anglicans, the Left and Reconstruction, 1940-1951
This paper explores the key role played by Anglicans in social reconstruction movements during and after the Second World War. The war prompted several initiatives by left-leaning clergy to create radical democratic communities – in Sheffield (Alan Ecclestone), in Bristol (Mervyn Stockwood), and in RAF camps (John Collins). The Bishop of Coventry, Neville Gorton, envisaged his new cathedral as central to the life of his rebuilt city. The cabinet minister Stafford Cripps, and his wife Isobel, were closely involved in several of these initiatives, while another politician, the maverick landowner Sir Richard Acland, espoused an idiosyncratic Christian socialism through his own political party, Common Wealth. After the war, some of these Anglicans came together with other Christians to establish Christian Action, which sought to Christianise domestic and international politics, campaigning for European unity and against apartheid in South Africa. But divisions developed in the movement over how far the new Labour government should go in reforming the economy and the Church of England, and over attitudes to nuclear weapons and the Soviet Union. Most accounts of the Church of England in this period have understandably been dominated by the figure of Archbishop William Temple, but this paper will examine the role of other progressive Anglicans in designing and constructing the ‘New Jerusalem’ of the 1940s.